WordPress is one of the best PHP Content Management Systems currently available. There are millions of live websites built using WordPress and this is testament to its authority and stability. One of the reasons why WordPress is so well known across developers and webmasters is because it has more than 40 thousands plugins available on the official WordPress website. These plugins help extend the functionality of your website.
In this article we compare 3 of the best 2015 WordPress cache plugins currently available.
The most popular and widely used cache plugins for WordPress are:
You can find other cache plugins on the WordPress platform, but the ones mentioned above are those that are considered best in terms of performance, popularity and reliability.
WP Super Cache
When talking about the top 3 caching system plugins for WordPress, we consider this a superb tool. It offers many choices to optimize your website and it can be used and configured from both beginner and expert WP administrators. There are options to apply CDN (content delivery network), pre-loading, set cache timeout and also sending emails when the garbage collection runs – a one stop shop that’s ready to use. Here is a preview of its Settings page.
W3 Total Cache
Another very good caching system that can quickly boost the speed of your website. W3 Total Cache is quite flexible and it has a good number of options, from allowing “Minify” of JavaScript and CSS to activating the content delivery network. All these options can reduce bandwidth, as the size of your pages and static content will be reduced significantly. The option to Import/Export settings can be handy when dealing with multiple websites. This plugin can be integrated with Google Page Speed. In the next release, we hope to see a way to set a cache timeout or to send notification emails when refreshing the cache.
See below for a list of options available on this tool.
Wordfence Security – Falcon engine
There’s nothing better than a plugin that can accomplish two important tasks at the same time! With this tool, both security and a good caching system are included. First off, this plugin is a security extension for WordPress, but it also has the Falcon Engine caching system that can improve the speed of your website and is just few clicks away. Once installed you will need to go into Wordfence > Performance Setup and choose Enable Wordfence Falcon Engine and click on Save as shown in the image below.
Test Results
Please note that the results that we are listing below are related to testing that we have performed on one of our projects, with specific settings that we applied on specific plugins.
Results can change on different WordPress installations.
Page Speed:
| Page | Without cache | WP Super Cache | W3 Total Cache | Wordfence Falcon engine |
| Homepage | 14.9 secs | 0.18 secs | 4.92 secs | 0.25 secs |
| Gallery page | 15.9 secs | 0.21 secs | 4.86 secs | 0.29 secs |
As we can see on the table above, all the plugins achieved good results in significantly reducing the loading page speed of the website. But the winner in today’s comparison is: WP Super Cache.
